“No. Not for a long time now. I think we’re all …” She covers the ears of the youngster standing in front of her and mouths the word: orphans.
I have faced gun barrels, Nazi inquisitors, policemen of all stripes, and even Sniper. They were all training grounds for what I’m facing now.
“I … I …”
Then little Sofia comes over and looks up at me. “We’ll all whisper. We’ll be good. We promise.”
I run my hand over my face—maybe in the hopes that when I open my eyes, only Ruth and her doll will be in front of me. “All right. Now listen, every one of you. All hold hands, and if I hear anyone say anything or whine or cry or even a stomach growl, I’ll beat you.”
“No, you won’t,” Ruthie says defiantly up to me.
“What makes you think so?”
“Because that would make us cry.”
How can I not love her? How can I leave her friends behind?
I scoop up the smallest so we can walk faster.
“Hold hands!” I growl down to the horde now following me out into the ghetto streets. The snow makes for difficult going, but the children keep to their word. Perhaps it’s the war, the shortages, the indignities, the loneliness. But they are deathly quiet during our short trek over to our cellar hideout.
“We’re home!” Ruthie whispers up to me as we round the corner.
“Only for a very short time.”
“Can I have my room back?”
“No. Other people live in your room now.”
“I want my toys back.”
“What did I tell you about talking?”
She puts her gloved hand to her mouth and flashes me wide eyes.
I knock out our code on the coal chute door. Otto knocks back, opens it, and I grin sheepishly as the eight new faces peer down.
“There’s been a change of plans,” I say as I pass down a child to Otto.
Once the children are all inside, Mrs. Praska stands, hands on hips, as they instinctively pool around her. I can tell she’s counting heads as they shyly peek out from under their hats and scarves. She’s just as speechless as I was earlier.
Otto pulls me into the root cellar. “What the hell have you done?” he cries.
“What the hell would you have done?” I bark back, throwing down my gloves. “The little blonde, that’s Ruthie, my sister. The little brat conned me! What could do? I couldn’t leave the others.”
“Hell, we’re not going to need a truck, Arab,” says Otto. “We’re going to need a goddamn bus!”
“What would you have done?” I bark again, taking a long drink from the bottle closest to me on the shelf.
Mrs. Praska lets herself in, grabs the bottle from my hand, and drinks. “Twenty-four of us,” she says, shaking her head.
XI.
We’ve barely introduced the new children around when Lizard knocks his code on the door. He comes sliding down, a wooden case strapped to his shoulder. He gets up, turns, and damn! A child slides down into his arms, followed by a woman laden with bundles.
Lizard immediately notices the new kids I’ve brought in. He looks at me, confused. “Shut up. You know exactly what happened!” I bark at him, nodding toward Irenka and her brother.
“Thank you so much for taking us,” Irenka says. “Our parents were deported, and I’ve been doing my best just to keep us eating. But I haven’t come empty-handed.” Her hand holds on tight to her brother’s. The little boy stands terrified and mute, two fingers in his mouth.
“I see that,” I say.
“No, I mean I’ve brought medicine. And this. I stole it off a desk. You might be able to use it. I think it goes on a car or ambulance.”
I unroll the fabric. It’s a small pennant, but the red cross in the grips of a Nazi eagle says it all. “Throws me off,” I say. “Swastika and red cross together.”
“Never mind. It’s a pass,” Lizard says, handing it to Mrs. Praska. “Keep it with the others.”
“Why were your parents deported?” Otto asks.
“Haven’t you heard? Literature professors and cello players are dangerous enemies of the Reich,” she says. Her chin is high and her eyes are dry. I look at her tight, gloved grip on her brother’s small hand. I have no stones to throw.
By dinner, the cellar sounds like a tuberculosis ward with all the children in it restless and coughing.
“I suppose they’ll all be coughing by morning,” Mrs. Praska says. “Those tiny bodies can’t fight off a bedbug bite, let alone a cold.”
“Or worse,” Irenka adds. “Whooping cough is going around. Thank God it’s not meningitis back again.”
Irenka sits now, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. The glow of the lantern light bounces off her face. A slight pop of turquoise peeps out from under her layers of sweaters. Lizard sits next to her and shares his ration of bread and a sip of liquor. I can see why he’s so infatuated. Love. Here, in the middle of a cellar, in the middle of a ghetto, in the middle of a war? Too bad, I think. Love can get a person killed.
I watch Otto pacing in and out of the shadows. He’s a far more complex person than I first thought. He’s obsessive about our mission, yet I’ve seen him break down with guilt, his anger at failure. I wonder if I’m seeing a man at odds with all those different passions. I wonder if he’s thinking what I’m thinking: How do you choose? How do you say yes to one and no to another? Isn’t that exactly what Hitler is doing? You, stay! You, go! You, live! You, die!
Otto cleans his glasses with a rag, something he does when agitated. He pulls me aside. “I tell you, Arab, this is far more complicated. We had a plan. We had an agreement.” He whispers to me out of one side of his face as he casts a nervous smile toward the children’s room. “Look how many we have!”
“What’s a few lives more or less?” I shrug my shoulders in the universal gesture of a “so what?” I wonder which Otto is going to emerge.
“Fine. Crying babies, coughing children. Good luck with your ‘You cry, you die’ mantra here! Why not put up a big sign that says, ‘Here we are, Adolf! Come and get us!’”
“I can get my hands on some neon, if you’d like.”
He looks at me. “Neon?”
“For your sign? Good God, Otto, keep up, will you?”
We lock eyes. Finally, he smiles, slings his arms around my shoulders and pulls me into a rocking, almost stifling hug. He whispers in my ear, “What would I do without you? If I’m the Messiah, you’re Joan of Arc.”
“Terrific.” I pull away from him just a bit. “You know how they both ended up.”
“Look! A gift from heaven!” Mrs. Praska says, coming into the boiler room and showing us the case of vials and pill bottles. “We’ll start by getting those coughs taken care of. Irenka and I quarantined the sicker children.”
“Hopefully they’ll keep their germs to themselves,” Irenka says, shaking a thermometer.
“It’s not as though it’s the plague or anything,” Mrs. Praska says. “They’re children. They have colds. They’ll be fine in no time.”
“I gave codeine to a few and they’re sleeping now,” Irenka says. “Come see.”
Irenka sweeps aside the hanging blankets that separate the quarantined children. Each face is peaceful as the children huddle together for warmth. Ruthie and both her Sofias are cuddled up, almost sharing the same breath.
I settle down into a corner and listen to the concert of breathing, snoring, and coughing. I try to remember the names and connect to the faces of twenty-six of us. Half quarantined. We social parasites might as well be imprisoned in one of those camps, Elsewhere, that Adolf F. Somebody is cultivating—dozens of them, with plenty of space for all us castoffs who spread political and Jewish contagion.
“Contagion,” I whisper into the darkness. I think back on the German soldier I’d talked to as he herded people to Elsewhere. I grin as I remember his expression when I told him only Aryans can die from Jewish colds. Stupid Kraut. Wait a minute! That stupid Kraut with the cold said
something about … where? Stutthof! Medical studies and experiments. Building three-legged women!
One of the children begins coughing. “Contagion!” I call into the darkness.
I pull my flashlight out and look at Otto’s map of Poland—or what once was Poland—and the lines separating the new three sections: Germany, Colony, Soviet. I run my finger from Warsaw to the new Nazi camp in the northwest. Stutthof. Just a few kilometers from the Gulf of Danzig, where there are private yachts ready to sail the children away to safety. “Stutthof,” I whisper. “Sick people! That’s it!”
My mind is racing, and we’re losing time. I am about to be either very, very clever or very, very stupid.
“If you keep having these delusions of grandeur, Arab, someone’s going to put a net over you and take you to the nut house over in Tworki,” Lizard says, sticking his nose back into the half-burned book he’s resurrected. “Go away. I’m reading.”
He waves me away, but then quickly rolls back. “What does Otto-the-Messiah-Kraut have to say about this plan?”
“I haven’t told him.”
“Well, from the way you two have been sparring over this whole fiasco, I’d say you better.”
“I don’t need his blessings, Lizard,” I snap.
“Well, I think it’s about the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.”
“No, listen! We make ourselves into something so vile, so feared, that the gates will open and they’ll be glad to be rid of us.”
“Like what? That Spanish Flu? Didn’t that kill millions in the Great War?”
“No, it has to sound even worse. We have to come up with something that will stop them in their tracks. Something very contagious.”
“What was that big plague?”
“Bubonic. Black Death.”
“Why can’t it be that one?”
“It can. But if we can come up with something new—so new it’s not even in the medical books yet—we might get clearance all the way to Stutthof.”
“Where’s Stuffhof?”
“Just a little village close to Danzig. Where they just happen to have a camp. For Jews. Maybe even sick Jews. Three-legged women.”
“Are you drunk?” Lizard asks, tossing a rag at me.
“Sober as a judge,” I whisper, looking around the cellar and thinking. My eyes land on the secret bulkhead of my father’s wine cellar. I’m remembering my schooling. Who knew more about plagues than Moses, having graced Egypt with ten of them? I run through all of them in my mind as I absently scratch a troublesome bug bite on the back of my neck. “I think we’re dealing with the Plague of Moses here.”
“The what?” Lizard asks.
“Better known as the Kinem Plague,” I add, recalling Moses’s third plague—the one with all the lice.
“Is there such a thing?”
“Could be.”
“How do you get it?”
“From lice.” I ignore the urge to scratch my head as Lizard’s hand goes to his. “You die in three days.”
“Lice don’t kill you.” He’s skeptical as usual. He pulls out a nit and squeezes it dead.
“When they carry the Kinem Plague they do.”
“You’re making this up.”
“Look, what do those guards know? If someone’s breathing any plague on you, would you go running to your medical book, or would you wave them through? And oh, how the Nazis would love to find a new Jewish disease. Hell, they already blame Jews for everything from typhoid fever to toenail fungus.”
“It’s Jewish? Oh, good. Then I can’t catch it.”
I hit him squarely in the chest. “No, Einstein! It’s not real! And even if it was, you gullible Catholics would be even more susceptible.”
For a minute, I think he believes me. Then a big smile spreads across this face. “Let’s tell Otto.”
“No. Not yet. Let him sleep. He feels like shit. Besides, he’ll probably just piss on it, like he has all my other brilliant ideas.”
“Yeah, but isn’t he in charge? Shouldn’t we …” His words fall away when he sees my face.
I plug my thumb into my chest. “This whole thing is my deal! I’m in charge!”
“This better not be just another battle of the sexes. Not with all these lives on the line!”
I get up and rummage for my heaviest overcoat.
“Hey, where’re you going?”
“I’ll be back. Get some sleep.”
XII.
I bundle up and creep back to the Minerva Theater, damning the crunch of the icy snow. I carefully round corners, not turning my flashlight on until I’m safely in the basement. I hang it off a wire above and look around. Where to begin? How to begin?
I drag out two panels of scenery from the stack against the wall and slice the canvas from the wooden frames. Now, paint. The cabinets and cupboards are difficult to open, but I yank hard and search for paint that hasn’t dried up or frozen.
I find two cans that slosh when I shake them. Black and brown. I mix them together. Then I rummage through the drawers and find an old crusty brush and—look here! Exactly what I need: stencils! I place the canvas panel on the floor; a menagerie of abstract painted faces laugh gaily up at me. I arrange the stencils to make sure I have enough room, then get to work. I finish panel one and hang it to dry, then work on another, identical one.
While waiting for my handiwork to dry, I explore the cellar of the old theater. When I was a kid, how many times did I sneak in here? I can still hear the echoes of laughter from the audience above, the steady flip flip flip of the film as it rolls, the hush of anticipation as the curtains rise. Will anyone, anywhere, ever hear those sounds again?
I slip into the room with WARDROBE written above the doorless jamb. There are clothes racks that were once crammed with costumes, but are now empty. There are heaps of burned and charred clothes on the floor. Who needs a Queen Antoinette wig or a cutaway tux when we’re freezing here in the ghetto? The paste buttons off a chorus girl costume might become a baby’s rattle. The cheap fur collar off a society matron costume might become a little girl’s muff.
Along the walls are shelves, also ransacked and empty. The trunks along the opposite wall have been flung open, the contents rifled through and stolen. It’s what everyone does here in Warsaw. We rifle, we raid, we rummage, we ransack.
I spot some high shelves, nearly hidden by ripped curtains. I stack some boxes, climb up, and yank open a stubborn cupboard. I check it with my flashlight, then reach in. “What the …?”
The boxes under me start to crack and I wobble. I grab the cupboard as the boxes tumble, leaving me hanging. Another crack of wood. Oh no! Now the damn cupboard—
After I hit the ground, I’m stunned but okay. My butt hurts from the edge of the box I’ve crushed. “What’s this?” In my hand is the bundle I was reaching for. Looks like sheets—good. Sheets have street value these days.
But wait. These aren’t sheets. What I’m holding is a thick stack of folded white uniforms, tied together with twine. I look at the card attached. NURSES ON PARADE. I flip through the folds and see each uniform has an identification tag: NURSE NAOMI, NURSE STELLA, NURSE MARJA, and HEAD NURSE LUCIA. I laugh out loud! “Damn!” Even theatrical characters have their papers in order! I clutch my find to my chest and struggle to get up, already feeling my back stiffen.
I don’t believe in divine anything, let alone intervention or inspiration. I believe in being in the wrong place at the wrong time, like those first twelve Jews I saw executed—and I believe in being in the right place at the right time, such as here in the cellar of the Minerva Theater, holding a pressed stack of nurse stage costumes. Still, I give a nod of thanks to anyone from above who might be looking down on me.
I raid a box full of greasepaint and other things they use to make actors look like someone they’re not. Anything that might make a healthy child look like death warmed up.
I’m frozen and exhausted. My butt hurts. The canvases aren’t drying very fast in this cold. After ano
ther hour, I decide I’ll just head back to the cellar. At least I can get warm there, and maybe catch some sleep.
As I leave the theater I breathe in the frozen night air, so cold it hurts my lungs and shoots some energy into me. Will it bring me to my senses, snap me out of this insanity, demand I just grab my sister, forget the rest, every girl for herself and her sister? Run away and … and then what? Vanish into thin air?
No. Not likely.
XIII.
I don’t get very far. Two blocks away, I hear eerie, faraway … is that singing? I stop and strain to listen. Singing? Here? It’s such an unexpected sound. Has hunger finally gone to my head? It echoes off the snowed-in streets and gets louder. A low voice—male—off key. I can’t hear words and I don’t recognize the tune. Or is it even a tune? Then I catch a word or two of German.
I look around for cover—easy to find on these streets. I feel for my Luger as I sprint behind a burned-out car and listen.
The singing gets louder. I see shadows of men approaching! I take out my Luger and wait, listening for the muted crunch of footsteps on the snow.
I strain to get a better look. “Otto?” I whisper. What the—? They come closer. Otto and Lizard! Look at them! A couple of falling-down drunks! Otto is swaying and Lizard is trying to keep him on his feet.
I put my Luger away and rise up, but quickly duck back down again. I’m not the only one who’s heard their drunken song. Two officers from the ghetto security are following them.
The police draw their pistols. Slowly, I edge closer, not sure what I can do if this turns nasty. Everything, all those lives in the cellar, all rest on Otto. And I’ll hate to lose an old friend and partner like Lizard. I’m looking around, listening for sounds of even more trouble, calculating odds.
Lizard sees me and we lock eyes. He ever-so-slightly nods his head toward Otto. I pull down my scarf and mouth “What?” And now I see by his scowl, his urgent eyes, that he’s not drunk. He’s in trouble.
I nod back to him, then dissolve into the shadows and listen.
The Girl Who Wouldn?t Die Page 21